CANTO 48 Andro in the dungeon
A
ndro in the dungeon of hard sciencewatches whitewash bleed off the walls;
deep in the castle whose cornerstone Sam Johnson kicked
on a caffeine high after a session at the chocolate house museum
where he oiled the ticking wax works of deism.
She can hear the hum of huge transformers in the electronic kitchen
where tureens of steaming plasma baste a juicy force-field
feeding a crackling grid
that sizzles to a crisp errant wisps of occulted
Zen lightning-bugs, missionary Mesquitos, or druidian dragonflies.
She can see the observation port where the gleaming iris
of Sir Richard Adamant’s right eye sticks and sucks.
Above her panels, tubes, cords, and wires hum and whir.
Around her, needles, adhesives, cups, probes, and curettes paw the air.
Beneath her, sensors with acute grand mal tick in their lust for input.
Everywhere light-emitting diodes and liquid crystal displays
flash null read-outs of perfectly calibrated readiness.
"What have you to say for yourself now?" Adamant’s voice booms.
She says nothing. "All right, then!" he warbles. Instantly
she is engulfed, probed, tapped, monitored, scanned,
irradiated, treated, tested, sampled.
Her thoughts appear in luminous color and digital sound on the main monitors
which are the whole front wall of the adjacent ampitheater full of banquet guests
and technicians sipping coffee and chemical cream.
The side walls are screens that display a barrage of Andro’s
pressures, levels, reflexes, reactions, hormone levels, enzyme movements, rates of flow, circulatory, digestive, reproductive, cerebro-spinal,
pineal synaptic charges, discharges, metabolisms, catabolisms.
The screen fills with swirls of color
and criss-crossing lines as assistants tune, twirl, and toggle,
and now with swirling shapes
as the speech synthesizers activate:
"The gills of the mods find ex-greedingly signed,
dealed, and re-slivered in the collective parsimony
of your data fits and starts that grind a pale puree
of my ambient being, a puddle of weak pudding,
soft slop, insipid sop to your hard science gone all
totalitarian Cromwellian Orwellian with the shot sun
of your Enlightenment franchise staining the mist
of my addled mind shining bleakly with bain-rows."
Collective humphs, harumps, a-ha’s, ho-ho’s, hmmm’s and ho-hums
aerosol the hall while Andro’s thoughts continue to display:
"Let the millstone of your empiricist measures
crack the grain of my Tibetan frenzy.
Grind fresh grants from my treasures
to shore up the stain of your measly collectivist
malignancy, malodoriferous majesty.
Close down the wicked cadence that bleeds
toward hi-tech catastrophe......
"Enough of this rant!" shouts Razzle as the screens go blank.